Boarding Schools

We list the top boarding schools and programs. You can also filter these schools in terms of various criteria and compare them in terms of academics and special needs support. Click on a school profile to learn all about it and decide whether it’s the right fit for your child.

We also provide an introductory discussion of boarding. This discussion covers a wide range of topics, including life at boarding school, the advantages of boarding, and the admissions process.

... we challenge our students to establish worthy goals and to act to good purpose."
—Stuart Grainger, Headmaster, Trinity College School

List of boarding schools

List of homestay schools

Going to boarding school

An introductory discussion of boarding schools and programs

Contents:

Quick Summary

The advantages of boarding schools

Life at boarding school

When to board

The admission process

Graduation requirements

The alumni experience

Compare boarding schools

Glossary

Further resources

1. Quick Summary

Boarding schools are unique, arising from a rich educational tradition, one that has informed the progress of education around the world, and here in Canada.
Boarding schools appeal to a broad range of learners, from a broad range of cultural, academic, and socio-economic backgrounds.
Boarding schools offer a broad range of academic environments, including single-gender and co-ed, as well as focused curricula, including the arts, sports, business, and leadership.
Boarding isn’t for everyone, and success depends on students arriving with a level of maturity and discipline that will allow them to make the most of the boarding experience.
Boarding schools offer educational environments that are challenging, and which promote independence, concentration, and discipline.
We list boarding schools and provide tools for comparing them.

2. The advantages of boarding schools

“Boarding school is not just a school where people live,” says Clayton Johnson, “it is a way of life.” Johnson is admissions director at Brentwood College School on Vancouver Island. “Boarding is all encompassing and life altering. It is the totality of this experience that is the ‘value added’ of boarding.”

Because of how we discuss it, it’s easy to focus on living arrangements. However, students don’t attend boarding school because they need somewhere to live. Rather, the living arrangements are a necessity of the kind of instruction that boarding schools intend. “When you’re operating within an independent school, in a smaller community, you can focus on values more, developing character and allowing kids to find their own place,” says Innes van Nostrand, principal of Appleby College in Oakville, Ontario. “And boarding is a hothouse that allows that to happen.” As such, boarding is less about what it is—schools where students and instructors live together on campus—than the kind of education that living on site, within a community of peers and mentors, allows.

Opportunity

Boarding school's chief benefit is the unique opportunity afforded by the quality of education and extracurricular programs. Read more.

What to look for: a specific curricular focus; a suite of student support, including professional and academic counselling offices; university partnerships; notable alumni; the school’s core educational values and mission statement.

When Sidney Crosby chose to board, his decision was based on the coaching and training opportunities that the school offered. Were it not for the presence of a robust hockey program, it’s likely that he would not have even considered the boarding option. Similarly, Clement Chan—founder of Columbia International College in Hamilton, Ontario—came to Canada from Hong Kong to board in order to access an education that wasn’t available to him back home.

For them, boarding wasn’t just an option. It was a solution, something that’s especially true for international students. In the best cases, that’s what will inform the decision to board: a desire to access opportunities that aren’t available at home. In some schools, such as those specializing in performing arts, the opportunities are more obvious than at others. That said, they aren’t unique in that. All boarding schools are intentional communities of interest, and each has its own specific focus. Some offer very targeted academic support, while others offer very targeted social support, as with Columbia International College, which was designed with the international student in mind. Still others express their focus within the infrastructure of the school itself. Brentwood’s dedication to developing a green campus, one that also reflects the cultural heritage of the region, is significant of the values that it intends to impart to its students.

In all cases it’s useful to get a sense of each school’s unique offerings, and there are various means of doing that. Lists of notable alumni don’t always reflect the work of the school—princes, for example, appear on those lists no matter what they achieve at school or afterward—though they often can at least hint at the kinds of personal and academic development that a school accentuates. At Branksome Hall, for example, the arts, letters, philanthropy, and leadership are all well represented in the list of alumni, just as they are within the school itself. Likewise, St. John’s-Ravenscourt has graduated 18 Rhodes scholars, as well as a world-class debating and public speaking program. That kind of consistency within the alumni population can be indicative of the academic culture of the school.

Tradition

Schools afford participation in tradition and ceremony. Read more.

What to look for: annual events and celebrations; a student body organized around a house system; daily or weekly chapel; uniforms.

A community of learners

Few childhood educational opportunities afford the closeness and community you find when you live with many of your classmates. Read more.

What to look for: per Orminston’s advice, when visiting a school, stop by the dining hall to get a sense the social organization fostered there; query parents of students via the Our Kids discussion forum; consider the values of the school as expressed in its mission statement.

A global perspective

International programs and education are a priority for boarding schools. Read more.

What to look for: Round Square; IB programs; international partnerships and exchange programs; a robust language program; instructors who have taught internationally.

Intensive international programs have become a priority for boarding schools. Havergal’s Global Experience Programs were created in order to further expose students to the perspectives and lives of others, and to participate in international partnerships. Similarly, students at St. John's-Ravenscourt School in Winnipeg team connect with peers in India to share ideas, collaborate on environmental initiatives, and develop communication skills. Fifteen schools in Canada participate in the Round Square program, a network of 150 schools in 40 countries, a program founded on the understanding that “learning is most effective when it is practical, cross-cultural and collaborative, and when it is infused through a broad spectrum of inter, extra and co-curricular activities.”

Diversity within the student body is thought to offer the most powerful introduction to cultural diversity, both as it exists in Canada and beyond. As a result, a majority of boarding schools actively foster cultural diversity within the student body through bursaries, scholarships, and international recruitment. In many schools, international students comprise between 40 and 50 percent of the student body, if not more. The student population of Bishop’s College School in Sherbrooke, Quebec, includes students from a dozen countries, despite an annual enrollment of just 220 students. Likewise, Ashbury College in Ottawa, Ontario, has more than 50 nationalities represented within its student population. “As with Canada itself, the faces you will see represent every kind of ethnic and racial diversity,” says Anne-Marie Kee, head of CAIS. “Layer upon that the significant number of overseas students at most schools and you truly have a unique community of learners.”

The benefits can be as subtle as they are vast. “A history class discussion about World War II is much different at a boarding school with students from Japan,” says Pete Upton, director of The Association of Boarding Schools. Likewise, the presence of a range of cultural perspective so close to hand can inspire introspection. Ayana Sunami, a student at Havergal, says “What is my strength and originality? What makes me, me? What are the similarities with other boarders with different cultural backgrounds? All these questions … helped me to be confident and open-minded.”

It’s precisely because of those kinds of conversations and introspections that boarding schools have created programs to encourage global awareness, and seek to grow the diversity of their student populations. “The goals of boarding,” says Deryn Lavell, head of school at Bishop Strachan School, “are really an opportunity for each girl to understand who she is, her place in the world, to become an independent young woman, to have a chance to learn leadership skills, [and] to find a voice in a multiplicity of voices.”

By their nature, boarding schools are globalized in admissions. This is seen in Canada and all other countries such as Poland, where szkoły z internatem house a mix of Polish students and children from families who have moved there from abroad. Read more about boarding schools in Poland.

Fostering self-reliance

Students in boarding schools are expected to take charge of their own lives in their daily routines. Read more.

What to look for: get a sense of daily routines, including the daily schedule; traditional boarding schools; military schools.

Academic support and development

Boarding school creates a supportive community where kids are challenged academically and learn to collaborate. Read more.

What to look for: schools that reflect, through in-class and extracurricular programs, a child’s interests, talents, passions, and emerging self concept; programs designed to support the specific learning and social needs of your child; participation in the Duke of Edinburgh program; an on-campus health and wellness centre; advanced placement courses.

In his book David and Goliath, Malcom Gladwell presents the case of Caroline Sacks, a straight-A student who chose to attend Brown University, an ivy-league school, over the less academically prestigious University of Maryland. Prestige was one of the factors in her decision, as was the fact that it had more resources, more academically able students, and more accomplished faculty.

That said, none of those things reflected what would ultimately be most important to Sacks. She needed a learning environment that was supportive for her, one that didn’t just teach what she wanted to learn, but that also provided an environment in which she was best able to learn. Brown was competitive; students felt that the competition between them for higher grades was more important than collaborative learning. The faculty was accomplished, though many members didn’t have the time to build relationships with individual students, something that Sacks had looked forward to as part of her university experience. Despite her natural talents and abilities, she floundered and ultimately dropped out of science. She later reflected that “If I’d gone to the University of Maryland, I’d still be in science.”

Gladwell writes that “how you feel about your abilities—your academic ‘self-concept’—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation.” Good students can be dragged down in environments that are limiting in some way, and limitations can present in various ways. For Caroline Sacks, the limiting factor was a culture of competition and, conversely, a lack of collaboration among peers.

In other instances, environments are limiting through a lack of programs that reflect a student’s specific suite of talents and curiosities. Kids who might excel at violin, for example, yet attend a school that doesn’t have a string music program, won’t thrive—even within core subject areas—in the way they would at a school that values and supports their musical impulse.

“I decided to attend a boarding school in Canada because I felt like wasn’t being challenged academically enough at my old school in Bermuda. Going to Canada for boarding I believed could not only provide me with the opportunity to be challenged academically, [but] also open me up to experiences which I would not have been able to experience back home.”
—Nathan Titterton, grade 11 student, Trinity College School

Social and personal development

The boarding environment presents unique opportunities for personal growth and social development. Read more.

What to look for: social programs, including those expressly meant to promote character, such as UCC’s Character Project; chapel programs, such as Appleby’s themed chapel speeches; leadership programs; affiliations with organizations providing personal challenges, such as Outward Bound; an expressed dedication to values; programs promoting social awareness and inclusion, such as Trinity College School’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

Mentorship

Teachers and even fellow students offer leadership and examples for younger students to mimic. Read more.

What to look for: when visiting a school, ask to meet with teachers, especially those within faculties that reflect your child’s interests; participation in the Duke of Edinburgh program; leadership programs; low teacher-student ratio.

Learning beyond the classroom

Boarding school programs offer a unique integration of life outside schoolwork with life in class. Read more.

What to look for: secondary outdoor education facilities; cross-curricular programs; a stated dedication to experiential learning; robust residential programs, including spirit and alumni events; participation in the Duke of Edinburgh program.

Our Kids: Private School Guide – Boarding Edition

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Lakefield College School has developed a robust program of outdoor education, taking advantage of its 155-acre wooded, waterfront campus in rural Ontario.

A culture of collaboration and co-responsibility

Boarding helps increase young people's awareness of, and ability to work with others. Read more.

What to look for: classrooms that are structured for collaboration: discussion tables, whiteboards on all four walls, moveable furniture; a listing of a school’s core educational values; participation in the Duke of Edinburgh program; low teacher-student ratio.

“In the past,” says Katrina Samson, head of school at Appleby College, “a huge part of education, even into post-secondary, depended only on the success of the individual. If you could sit down and plow through the textbook on your own, you could be very successful without having to talk to anyone else.”

Today, of course, there are different demands. The trend in education is to focus more on collaborative skills, this precisely because the workforce requires collaborative effort. Which, Samson admits, can be tiring. “It takes longer as you work through those challenges and those skills. And so that’s what you see in the classroom environments now. Students are working in pods, or they’re up and about. There’s a lot more physical movement.”

At Appleby, many classrooms are equipped with tables that can be pulled apart to create smaller workspaces. “When there’s no one here, each of the classrooms looks similar in terms of its structure. But when you walk down the halls when classes are in session, each classroom will look very different depending on the subject area, the day, what they’re doing.”

They’ve found that this style of classroom creates opportunities and, as importantly, responsibilities on the part of the learners. “It is a student-driven exploration of literature,” says Samson. “If they come in without having anything read, without having anything done, there’s nothing happening. The responsibility for them finding and extracting meaning, asking questions, pushing one another with the teacher acting as a guide, pushing that questioning. … There is a sense of co-responsibility and co-ownership over exploration and learning.”

It’s not a style of learning that would work equally well in all instances, or in all subject areas, though they have found that the concept behind it—collaboration and discussion—can be applied in some areas that we may feel, initially, are less conducive to it. “A math class is a great example,” says Samson as she enters a classroom where whiteboards line all of the walls. “Students are up, putting solutions to a range of problems on the board, and then they’re walking around the room, describing how they arrived at the solutions.”

Students are active, putting their own ideas into practice, and to see how others may find other approaches to similar problems. “When they have to walk through their thinking process,” she says, “there is that sense of co-creation of knowledge that certainly didn’t exist in the classrooms we knew as students.” An unexpected benefit, Samson has found, is the assessment opportunities that it creates. “Its is a far more powerful piece for a teacher to understand a student’s progress,” used in concert with traditional testing, “in order to understand what might be a challenge down the road and to prepare for that.”

There is also a greater sense of responsibility to arrive prepared, having done the readings or assigned exercises, and to spend time in class engaging with others around the material. An unexpected benefit, Samson has found, is the assessment opportunities that it creates. “It is a far more powerful piece for a teacher to understand a student’s progress,” used in concert with traditional testing, “in order to understand what might be a challenge down the road and to prepare for that.”

“… For me, boarding school was a transformative experience in learning to communicate with others.”
—Pete Upham, Executive Director of The Association of Boarding Schools

Cross-curricular instruction

The extra spare time at boarding allows for more integrated curricula and programs. Read more.

What to look for: flexible learning spaces; a stated dedication to cross-curricular instruction; programs designed to promote collaboration between the arts and sciences.

Many boarding schools have created programs to develop that kind of academic environment. Wendy A. Milne is assistant head of academics at Shawnigan Lake School where she helped found the Genius Hour, a cross-grade, cross-curricular exercise in which students are charged with creating their own project and seeing it through to completion. The only provisos are that each project involve collaboration, have a clear guiding question, and involve research.

“The idea is to remove all barriers to creativity,” says Milne. “It’s part of making education work for a new job market [that] we don’t yet entirely understand,” says Milne. “We want to teach them how to think, how to learn, how to ask, and even how to fail.” Projects range from getting a better night’s sleep, to building a better golf club, to diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. Andrey Petropavlovskiy presented during the first Genius Hour program in 2015. “All around the school,” he said at the time, “I hear different people talking about their projects. Some of them are amazing. I would never have thought about that.”

The lessons of MIT’s Building 20
The impetus for the Genius Hour is the belief, as Jonas Salk suggested when founding the Salk Institute in 1960, that the best work occurs at the boundaries between disciplines, and that often the most important discoveries were made when those boundaries were blurred.

The most striking example of the benefits of blurring curricular boundaries, and one that boarding schools look to today, is MIT’s Building 20. It was constructed in 1943 as a temporary building to provide space for the war effort. It was intended to stand “for the duration of the war and six months thereafter.” Instead, it remained for more than 50 years, and became the most celebrated building on the MIT campus.

After the war, the building became a kind of overflow space, providing offices for researchers and professors from a range of faculties and departments. Therefore, the occupants reflected an eclectic range of interest and expertise, with all talking to each other, sharing ideas, and, ultimately, making important discoveries. Experiments in acoustics lead to the formation of the BOSE corporation; the model railroad club became the basis for what we now know as hacker culture; Noam Chomsky pioneered a new wave of linguistics. All credited the discussions in the hallways, the cross-pollination of ideas and concepts that they allowed, as essential to the work that they did.

“People didn't love this building for its beauty or its comfort” said Walter Mitchell, dean of the school of architecture, “but for its flexibility. What we learned from Building 20's success was that we would need to provide modern services and technology without being rigid or constraining.”

Also housed in Building 20 were the offices of the Independent Studies program, the High School Studies Program, and the Educational Research Centre. While all would move into other buildings, they took the lessons of Building 20 with them. The development of the MIT Media Lab is, in many ways, a direct result. It was designed to provide a flexible learning environment devoted to projects at the convergence of technology, multimedia, sciences, art and design.

Beyond MIT, boarding schools have been the first to capitalize on those ideas, and to design facilities to reflect them. One of them is Bishop Strachan, which founded its Idea Lab in 2015. “We know now that bringing disciplines together, allowing them to intersect naturally by virtue of proximity, will empower the learning that our girls need for today’s world.”

Cross-curricular programs—such as Shawnigan’s Genius Hour, Trafalgar Castle School’s Integrative Thinking Program, and Bishop Strachan’s Idea Lab—are increasingly common. “We want them to [find] a passion, and to be genuinely passionate" about the work they do, says Barry Welsh, deputy headmaster at Shawnigan Lake. "This isn’t just about waiting to answer the questions at the back of the book.”

Dr. Robert Thirsk, University of Calgary Chancellor and former Canadian Space Agency astronaut talks with Grade 12 student Andrey Petropavlovskiy following Thirsk’s Genius Hour presentation to Shawinigan faculty and students in September 2015.

Read about the need for boarding.

Academic innovation

Schools are often at the cutting edge of educational and instructional improvements. Read more.

What to look for: a diverse instructional environment; integration of technology into the classroom; leadership opportunities; scholarships and financial aid; 21st century literacies.

“What is it that our children need most?” That’s the question that Anne-Marie Kee used as the cornerstone of her opening address at the CAIS conference in 2015. Part of the answer, as subsequently became a focus of the conference that summer, is the need to be inquisitive and creative. However, they weren’t talking about the students, they were talking about the educators. The strength of a school is a product of a continual reassessment of what children need to fulfill their potential and to prepare them for the world that they will enter after they graduate.

When van Nostrand talks about boarding as a “hothouse” for education, that’s in part what he’s thinking about: the institutional gains and the role that boarding schools have played and continue to play in educational innovation and development.

“A real revolution in methods”
A telling example is the Harkness method, a style of teaching used at a majority, to varying degrees, of private and independent schools throughout North America.

The method is named after Edward Harkness, the result of an endowment that he made in 1930 to Philips Exeter Academy, a boarding and day school in Exeter, New Hampshire. Harkness made the endowment with an eye to improving classroom instruction. The money was to be spent, per his note to the principal of the school, not on training or teachers, but tables.

"What I have in mind is teaching boys in sections of about eight in a section . . . where boys could sit around a table with a teacher who would talk with them and instruct them by a sort of tutorial or conference method, where the average or below average boy would feel encouraged to speak up, present his difficulties, and the teacher would know what his difficulties were. . . This would be a real revolution in methods."

Harkness worked with the treasurer of the school, Corning Benton, to find the right design. Benton was a hobby carpenter and, after a few false starts, he came up with a table that met the goals that Harkness had set for him. It shouldn’t have a “head”—all those around it should gather as equals, and the table was to be shaped in a way that didn’t impose a hierarchy or positions of privilege. The shape would ensure that everyone at the table could speak directly to every other person in the class, and to feel included whenever others were speaking. It would be oval, rather than circular, with a narrow waist to reduce the space between students, bringing them closer together.

Benton’s original tables are still in use at Philips Exeter today. They were too large to fit through the classroom doors, so were built in situ. Not surprisingly, they remain in place today. The concept is less about furniture than it is an expression of a belief in what education is meant to do. Harkness believed that learning is best when done collaboratively, and when diverse ideas and insights are encouraged. Past principal Tom Hassan described the success of tables, “the best example of how we all learn to think more creatively, deeply and compassionately when we experience the various viewpoints of others.”

It was a stark contrast to the teaching style that was common at the time: hierarchical, competitive, didactic. Harkness believed that the best teaching was the opposite: egalitarian, inclusive, and Socratic, based on a process of guided inquiry and discussion.

Boarding schools across Canada, including Appleby, Brentwood, Branksome Hall and others continue to adopt and adapt his initial concept. “The greatest challenge for the Harkness teacher is usually waiting and listening, not pointing out that critical connection a student almost made,” says Lisa McRae, an English and social studies instructor at Havergal College. “I make a note in case I need to highlight it later, but almost inevitably if I wait, the students arrive at that idea themselves—and they are richer for making the journey with the teacher as observer.”

Some, rightly, have noted that there can be downsides:

“Discussion-based learning can broaden the student experience in amazing ways. It can also frustrate students and teachers, the former because they cannot figure out what is required by a text, an inquiry and a course, the latter because they cannot understand why the students do not see what they see in a text. It is so easy to forget that our analysis is supported by years of analytical experience and a wide range of knowledge and critical underpinnings. Our goal is to give our students a taste of that richness of understanding by mimicking extensive experience with a variety of layered texts.”

Not all schools use the Harkness method in their classrooms, and no one would suggest that they should. The guiding principle, and one that it serves well to illustrate, is the value of instructional innovation. “I have been in too many conversations where people debate the benefits various curricula without recognizing that the nature of how a faculty member delivers [for example] an economics course and the dynamic within the course is far more important than the content differences between AP, IB and Ontario economics.”

In the best instances, innovation is about finding the right way to engage with the students in the room and, ultimately, to encourage the competencies they will need when they enter professional life: to think creatively, to collaborate with others, and to practice ethical leadership.

Time

Boarding school creates a unique full-time immersion in learning. Read more.

What to look for: review school syllabi and schedules, including the duration of terms and semesters.

Pickering College began its life in 1848 as a coeducational school, reflective of the values of the Quaker sect that founded it.

3. Life at boarding school

When asked if boarding school is like Hogwarts, Russell Pecka doesn’t talk about the houses, the buildings, or the dining hall. He talks about the teachers. Pecka is a grade 12 student at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. He says that “Hogwarts has several teachers who don’t seem very supportive or who aren’t very kind to their students.” In contrast, “every teacher I’ve had has been very willing to help me out, and they care sincerely about my success.” People like his chemistry teacher who offered to tutor students on weekends when they needed a bit more guidance navigating the material. “I’ve never gone to a school where teachers do that.”

A day in the life of a student at Trinity College School.

Pecka decided to attend Trinity College School based primarily on its word-of-mouth reputation—his cousins were students there—as well as an understanding of the strength of the academic program. Boarding, while not initially a deciding factor, became a plus as well. Pecka’s parents were beginning to relocate more frequently because of their careers. In retrospect, he regrets that he didn’t board earlier in his academic career. “My brother’s education wouldn’t be interrupted like mine was when we moved around.”

That kind of consistency is important to him, both in the longer term as well as the day-to-day. When talking to him, it’s clear that Pecka is a student who appreciates the routines that Trinity offers. He says that “I make it a point to get to breakfast every day because I normally have a bad day when I don’t eat. Next, I’ll head to Chapel, which is at 8:10. Trinity is an Anglican school; however, there is no pressure to convert or to participate in religious activity. Chapel is meant to be a time when the community can gather and reflect on the day before and think about the way they live their lives.” He continues saying:

“After that I head over to my first two classes of the day. Trinity runs on a block/cycle schedule where we have eight class periods over the span of two days. Then I have an hour-long lunch break where I can go to club meetings and hang out with my friends. After I attend my last two classes I go to my sport, which is squash, which I play until dinner at 5:15. Following that, most students attend mandatory study periods in classrooms from 7-9 after which we are free to do whatever we want until 11.”

It’s a pretty good day: no commutes, strong interpersonal connections, and a growing sense of independence and responsibility. He has breakfast, for example, not because he’s forced to, but because of the insight he’s gained from days when he’s skipped it.

While the balance of structure and freedom wouldn’t be right for every student, Pecka recognizes that it’s the right balance for him. He, as all the students who board, is mentored all day, every day, by older students, resident adults, and faculty members. Social currency is often earned by excelling rather than rebelling, something that is true in all areas of student life, from the classroom, to the playing field, to the residence hall. Joe Seagram is the headmaster of King’s-Edgehill in Windsor, Nova Scotia. “If the boy next door to you is brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed—and he’s older than you and you look up to him—then you’re going to do the same. If the girl next to you in study hall is a few grades ahead and she’s sitting quietly doing her work, you’ll likely follow suit. Our older students are fabulous role models, showing the younger students what needs to be done in order to achieve success.”

Life in residence, or, is boarding school fun?

“It was definitely fun living in a boarding school. You're on your own but not really, and it advances your maturity.”
—Zach Bogosian, NHL player, became great at boarding school

Boarding school is fun and there are even some cool boarding schools... within limits. Residences include students from all grade levels for which a boarding program is offered. Most have a roommate from the same grade, and houses have communal areas for shared indoor and evening activities. Students typically live on campus for the school year, including statutory holidays and weekends. Some schools offer the option of five-day boarding, with students spending the weekdays on campus, living in a dormitory, and the weekends at home with family. Students are assigned an advisor whose role is to keep an eye how they’re doing, and to offer advice on programming, academics, and extracurricular activities. Students are able to meet with advisors daily, though access is open and fluid. Advisors report to parents and guardians regularly, and can also be approached with questions.

Each school requires students to sign and adhere to a code of conduct which, in all cases, is strict. Dealing drugs, selling alcohol, sexual aggression, committing extortion and possessing a weapon or explosive substance all result in immediate expulsion. Other zero tolerance offences are smoking, taking illicit drugs, and bullying. Students and their family are typically given an opportunity to meet with the head of school, though expulsions are not imposed lightly or rashly. If a student has completed diploma requirements equivalent to the provincial graduation requirements, the school will grant a provincial diploma, though otherwise all tuition and the opportunity to graduate with a diploma from the institution are forfeited.

Illustration from A History of Eton College 1440-1875, by Sir Henry Churchill Maxwell Lyte. When the history was published in 1877, Eton had been operating as a boarding school for more than four centuries.
Read more about the history of boarding in the UK and Canada.

The house system
Houses are a traditional feature of British boarding schools, one that adds to the fun and enjoyment of life here. The system has been adopted at schools throughout the Commonwealth. The most familiar house system, of course, is the one that Harry Potter enters at Hogwarts. It’s fictional, though the basic concept is reflective of reality. When students arrive at school they are assigned to a house where they will remain until they graduate. Often houses correspond to residence buildings, though not always. The number of houses varies from school to school, typically ranging somewhere between four and 10—Bishop Strachan has 12 houses, for example, while Rothesay Netherwood has four. Boarding schools that offer a day program may have houses that include both day and boarding students, or, as at Trinity College School and Upper Canada College, they will have separate houses for boarding and day students.

Naming conventions vary between schools. Often they will be named after people who have played a prominent role in the life of the school—as Trinity and St. Margaret’s—or may be developed around a theme, such as local geography. Houses remain a very traditional element of boarding school, and names, mottos, and crests often reflect that larger tradition.

The house system provides a basis for student competition and school spirit. Typically, houses compete for points that are accumulated over the duration of a school year. At St. Margaret’s, for example, points are accumulated in both academics and athletics in competition for the Margaret Barton Inter-House Challenge Cup (academics) and the Godson Trophy (athletics).

Houses also form the basis for a sense of belonging and identity, something that can be particularly helpful for new students acclimating to school life. Houses are smaller, more personal groupings within the school population, and provide the basis for ongoing pastoral care.

Unlike public schools that often organize by grade level, the house system organizes arbitrarily, with each house including members from all the grade levels offered at the school. Older students may be assigned to younger ones to provide mentorship, though often those kinds of relationships develop informally as well.

Houses typically will have both faculty and student leadership. Student leaders are appointed house captains or prefects, with staff members being assigned housemaster or housemistress for each house. The terms vary between schools—at Bishop’s the staff leaders are called houseparents—though all schools provide round-the-clock supervision by staff.

Where real houses differ most from those at Hogwarts is that they are far more positive, less sinister, and competition between them less harsh. In real life, houses provide the structure and social framework within which students interact, compete and socialize. Much like cabin groups at summer camp, they also can provide a valuable sense of kinship, shared experience, and belonging.

The four houses at Rothesay Netherwood, New Brunswick, are named for British ruling families: Stuart, York, Tudor, and Lancaster.

When things go wrong

Is boarding school bad, as it's often made out to be in the media? Commenting on a case of assault at a boarding school, Shamus Kahn says, “I’m not surprised by it, to be honest.’’ Khan, a sociology professor at Columbia University, adds, “But I wouldn’t be that surprised by it at any college or high school.”

Kahn was commenting on a case of sexual assault that occurred in 2014 at St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire. Khan is an alumnus of the school, and while he noted to the Boston Globe that the assault could have happened anywhere, he believed it nevertheless made national headlines precisely because of where it happened and who it happened to. In the days and months after the assault, St. Paul’s was invariably described in the press as elite and exclusive (implying, in other words, that boarding schools are all bad, because of this one incident). Owen Labrie, the perpetrator, was described in the press as a star student, popular, privileged, good looking and athletic. He had been accepted to attend Harvard after graduation, something that added a final punctuation to Labrie’s profile, as presented in the media, as the stereotypical boarding school student.

Both Labrie and the administration of St. Paul’s became lightning rods for the biases and the derision of the nation. The story became emblematic, serving as an indictment of boarding school, underscoring its privileges as well as its abuses. It was described as the result of an endemic rite of passage, a tradition that even had a name: the “senior salute.” The fact that the dean of students admitted that he was aware of the tradition yet didn’t do anything to intervene rightly caused outrage among the parents who had trusted the school with the care of their children.

“The school indeed knew, but I doubt they understood the full implications of such a tradition,” wrote Tim Hillman at the time, adding that schools are “woefully unable to police sexuality on campus.” In The New Yorker Jeannie Suk wrote that the case “illuminated the need for education in schools on healthy attitudes toward sex” and that “education must address the attitudes of both boys and girls.” For a majority of the people seeing the story unfold in the media, however, blame was assigned more to those within the school walls than outside them.

Gender, sexuality, identity
Boarding school isn’t a pancea. No school, boarding or otherwise, is immune to the social problems and prejudices of the larger cultural context. Further, the relationship between gender, sexuality, and boarding school has always been an uneasy one.

At one time, rather than policing sexuality, parents looked to boarding school to enforce what they would have considered to be normative behaviour. Ted Rogers, founder of Rogers Communications, recalled that “my pediatrician advised my mother that I should go to a boys’ environment because if I stayed home with my mother and a nanny, I’d become a sissy.” He was seven.

It is true that boys’ boarding schools, at that time, weren’t for "sissies," at least in the sense Rogers would have understood that term. (To some extent the term expressed, indirectly, a cultural unease with homosexuality.) Schools enforced a very singular, narrow vision of masculinity. For some parents—and apparently some pediatricians as well—that alone provided the motivation to send children to boarding school. It wasn't a place for finding yourself, or refining your interests, or growing into who you were or wanted to be.

Rogers certainly wasn't a “sissy” in his adult life, again in the sense of that term as he would have adopted it. We’ll never know if that's a result of his boarding school education. For others, the experience was more fractured. Michael Ignatieff, like Rogers, was a student at Upper Canada College (UCC). Looking back, he says that “the logic of boarding [at the time] was basically to get puberty out of the house, to get boys away from their parents so they can become sexual animals alone.”

“The single-sex environment produced a certain homophobia, which I now very much regret. I have very strong emotional feelings toward men, some of which were cultivated by that environment … Yet there was a tremendous anxiety about crossing the line into homosexual experience. I think it is very right and appropriate for men to love each other … . That was damn difficult in that school, and made more difficult than it needed to be.”

There was a tension in Ignatieff’s day that perhaps is less with us today, if only because sexuality is less cloistered. In its place, though, are new tensions, many which derive from an understanding of the benefits of authority as well as potential abuses. “I think it’s important for a boy, for a young man,” says Ignatieff, “to see male authority that he can believe in.”

Increasingly schools are giving a very welcome attention to how they can address their students emerging academic, social, and gender identities, and to provide the kind of authority, both from men and women, that Ignatieff describes.

Is boarding school worth it?

In the end, parents and students want to know if boarding school is worth it: the money, the separation from parents, the exclusion from society, etc. A number of these factors, though, conspire to form unique leadership qualities in boarding school students and graduates, and for most who invest in boarding, the final answer is a resounding "Yes!"

In 2003, Chris Studer was in grade 7 at UCC, and was admittedly a bully. “I definitely had a mean streak,” he said, reflecting years later, admitting that it came from his insecurity and the desire to find a place within the social life of the school. His insecurity led to the use of slurs toward those who were different, or were perceived to be different from himself, particularly around the issue of sexual orientation. At a forum hosted at the school in 2013, Studer invited Calum Mew to join him on stage, one of the people he had bullied all those years before. They both told their stories, and Studer voiced his regrets.

Of course that past can’t be changed, but Studer and Mew's participation in the forum was significant of an ongoing dedication to a program of mentorship around gender, sex, and the full range of relationships that students share during their time at school. It was emblematic of a more open discussion, one that had been validated by school administration with the launch in 2001 of the Gay-Straight Alliance in order to create an opportunity to acknowledge the sexual and personal diversity at the school. The project was created to look forward, and to encourage an open, supportive setting. Interestingly, it also provides opportunities to look back—as it did for Studer—to acknowledge and address the past.

A Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) began at Trinity College School in 2002 when a straight teacher got together a group of students who were tired of the use of derogatory terms and the harassment that was going on at the school. It is still running today, and the membership continues to grow. There, as at other schools with similar programs, membership levels perhaps aren’t as important as the presence of the initiatives.

Schools, understandably, have always reflected the culture that they are within. Cultural ideals are implicit within the school’s language, curriculum, and traditions, something that has of course been true throughout the ages. For much of our history, schools were a means of establishing and maintaining a status quo, with the needs of society as the principal driver.

Today, more than ever before, the opposite is true: boarding schools aren’t about maintaining the status quo, but about striving for something better, and working to provide a model for how we could, and should, live as a nation. “It is critical that we interrupt dominant cultures,” says Nicols, “by questioning norms and injecting new, more inclusive traditions into school life and curriculum.”

The Character Project
New programs and initiatives, such as UCC’s Character Project, are designed to instigate exactly that kind of interruption. In 2015, Jim Power, principal at UCC, described the Character Project as a means of getting at something that he feels is essential to a complete education. In an address to the student body, he said that while “we can see how you’re doing in math, French, and English ... we can’t accurately determine the more important questions: how do you deal with adversity? Do you demonstrate courage in the clutch? And most importantly, What kind of guy are you becoming?”

The goal of education, Power believes, isn’t restricted to academics. It’s also, as he said in that same address, “to help you all find and become your best selves,” a process that includes social-emotional development, maturity, decision-making, and mental health. True to that goal, the school created a new role, that of Character Integrator, in 2014. In addition to teaching English and Drama, Laurie Fraser became the first member of the faculty to take on the post. “It’s important for [students] to have a sense of autonomy,” says Fraser, “and feel like they have influence in their school, because that engagement and ownership of their school life deepens their connection to their school culture.”

The Character Project is part of an ongoing commitment to allowing students to have that kind of connection, and to providing opportunities for them to exercise it in ways that are meaningful and tangible. “It’s really hard to act in the world with kindness and generosity when you don’t feel good on the inside,” says Fraser. “We have conversations in a series of workshops about character strengths and the pillars of well-being, including positive emotions, engagement, relationships, finding meaning and having a sense of accomplishment in life.” The Character Project, and programs like it, recognize gaining a sense of identity, and finding meaning and accomplishment in life, is a process that we all share equally.

Laurie Fraser runs UCC's Character Project. “We have conversations in a series of workshops about character strengths and the pillars of well-being, including positive emotions, engagement, relationships, finding meaning and having a sense of accomplishment in life.”

4. When to board

“I don’t think anyone’s eager to say goodbye to their kids, certainly,” says Katrina Samson. “They are still kids. It’s a big deal moving away from home.”

And, certainly, there are risks, especially when the decision to board isn’t made with the best interests of the child in mind. When Camilla Parker-Bowles’ son Tom asked why she sent him to boarding school at the age of 7, she responded—while expressing a deep sense of regret—that simply “it was the thing you did.” There are other bad reasons, too, and many of them are often raised as criticisms of private school itself: to rub shoulders with the elite, to find mates from wealthy families, to demonstrate wealth or social status. Parents of boarding school students aren’t immune to making decisions, even good decisions, for the wrong reasons. For Camilla Parker-Bowles, the result is a sense of regret and loss; for her son Tom it’s is a sense of betrayal. The experience of boarding school is one that he has worked hard to reconcile.

Family or cultural traditions certainly aren’t to be dismissed out of hand, as they can be very powerful and important motives. In many cases, they are both workable and beneficial. However, decisions based only on those criteria can be problematic.

Maturity

Maturity can mean different things. At it’s most basic, it refers to age and, increasingly, we can be confident that children younger than 11 or 12 shouldn’t be considered candidates for boarding. Joy Schaverien, a psychotherapist, coined the term “boarding school syndrome” to describe a cluster of behaviors and symptoms that she noticed within adults who had boarded in Britain as children. In a 2011 paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy she wrote: “Children sent away to school at an early age suffer the sudden and often irrevocable loss of their primary attachments; for many this constitutes a significant trauma. … In order to adapt to the system, a defensive and protective encapsulation of the self may be acquired; the true identity of the person then remains hidden. This pattern distorts intimate relationships and may continue into adult life.”

Schaverien’s father, even seventy years later, still vividly recalled the pain of being left at boarding school when he was a child. He was six when he first enrolled, and we can assume that he wasn’t involved in the decision to board. Nick Duffel is author of The Making of Them: The British attitude to children and the boarding school system. There he writes from his own experience of boarding school, which he entered at age 8 in 1957.

It’s hard to think of a good reason to separate a seven-year-old or an eight-year-old from her family, and Duffel and Schaverien have spoken out against boarding for the very young. It’s a practice that still exists in Britain, though is becoming less common. It’s not just about the damage that it can do, but also about what boarding can offer and what it can’t.

Emotional maturity
The British tradition, at least at certain points in history, reflected the Victorian idea that children are to be seen and not heard. Sending them off to board was a means of reinforcing a division between children and adult life. Today, we understand that boarding is best considered principally from the perspective of the child, positing the best means of supporting her intellectual and personal development. Sidney Crosby went to board because of the opportunities that he saw there, opportunities that were only available because of his level of maturity and his personal goals.

It’s that perspective that perhaps distinguishes the tradition of boarding as it exists in North America today. Some schools will accept boarders when they are 12 years old and entering Grade 7, though most programs don’t enroll boarding students younger than 13. As well, most schools don’t require students to enter at a certain grade, or a certain age, instead taking cues from the child as the deciding factor.

Emotional maturity is something that admissions officers assess within an admissions interview, and it’s not at all uncommon that parents are asked to wait a year or even two. They will often advise that parents look for breaks in a child’s education, and move into boarding at a natural point for them.

“There is no magic age in general. But there may be a magic age for your child," say Barbara Coloroso. “You need to look at your child's gifts and their needs. Where are they now? What is their situation? … Trust your own gut, your own sense of what is good for your child.”

“Anyone who has been doing this as long as we have knows the cycle … The beginning of the year is like camp; everyone is busy and having fun so there’s little time for homesickness. But as school gets underway and the work builds up, there are always blue days.” .... “We have a highly receptive culture here and students are always encouraged to seek help if and when they need it.”
—Rebecca McKay, director of admissions, Queen Margaret’s School

Pull factors

In the majority of cases, students are drawn toward boarding based on their goals and their desires. The Alberta Ballet School, for example, attracts students not because it offers boarding, but because it offers an opportunity to be immersed in an art form that they are passionate about, and to join peers, mentors and instructors that share that passion. Whether it’s the arts, science, athletics, outdoor education, business, or various academic foci, all boarding schools offer specific opportunities that specific students are drawn to.

Likewise, they offer infrastructure—an observatory, studios, a collaborative environment—that are often essential tools to student success in a specific field. As Malcolm Gladwell has noted, Bill Gates most likely would not have had the same success had he not attended attend Lakeside, a private school in Seattle. The school had a computer, something that no other schools in the region had at the time. It was one of a new generation of computers, made even more unique through a partnership with the University of Washington, one that included a computer terminal at Lakeside with a direct link to the university mainframe. Aptitude is important, though access to the right tools, and an expansive environment, is important, too.

Academic support
School focus
Challenge
Opportunity
A community of shared interest
An expansive environment

“ … we gave our kids a fair amount of autonomy in the process of choosing a high school, focusing on finding a school that uniquely suits them. We took some heat for that, and for allowing them to choose boarding. So as I watched them own their decision, share their enthusiasm for their boarding school experience, and handle themselves with grace and confidence, I have to say it: I felt proud.”
–Anne Marie Kee, CAIS

Push factors

Boarding schools, precisely because they are involved in a child’s life 24/7, spend far more time, energy, and creativity on creating an expansive, positive environment than other institutions do. That’s not lost on parents, such as Wille, who are aware of the value of mentorship and the ability of boarding to provide it. We live in a world that seeks to exploit technology in bringing education to a wider public, and indeed there is worth in that. Yet, there is also considerable worth in mentorship, placing students within a context that will be expansive. Often who we learn from, and the way in which they approach us, can be as important as the lessons themselves.

“At any time, if your child is experiencing ongoing and unresolved problems—with issues like bullying for example—parents should consider another schooling option.” Erin McLaughlin adds that “No time is ever off limits, especially if a child is being targeted by peers or facing insurmountable obstacles in the present setting with no relief in sight.”

Likewise, there is an ever increasing range of programs on offer. “As research and development into helping kids and teens with special needs, whether behavioral, physical or mental, continues to grow, we see new specialized educational models and schools opening up. In particular, we have seen an increase in parents looking for these programs,” says Erin McLaughlin.

In 2007, the Fraser Institute released a study co-authored by Derek Allison that presented findings about who was choosing the private school option and what their motives were. Among the most striking, and which gained media attention at the time, were that the parents choosing private school weren’t perhaps who we may have thought they were. There was a greater socioeconomic diversity, and a significant number of parents sending their children to private school hadn’t attended private schools themselves. The study found that, more than ever, "they're making a deliberate choice" and one based on a greater range of criteria. The bottom line is that options in education are important, with parents seeking to address the specific needs of their children.

Dr. David Harley is Dean at Robert Land Academy in Wellandport, Ontario. He notes that the school accepts boys whose temperament gets them into trouble. “Most of the boys would be characterized by the fact that they are underachieving but they have a lot more potential than they are demonstrating.”

The school offers a structure and a discipline that, while it may be onerous for some, is often the key to the student’s success. The school also follows a clean-living philosophy, with strict limits on junk food, and an emphasis on a wide range of physical activity. “If you lose weight,” says Harley, “your body image is better, you’re feeling good, getting better marks.”

Structure and discipline
Social development
Positive mentorship
Academic support

5. The admission process

“There is no one thing that we look for in a student: our students are academically strong, able to contribute to activities outside of the classroom, have a good sense of self, and are keen to learn and be engaged.”
–Louise Paoli di Prisco, Assistant Director, Boarding Admissions, Ashbury College, Ottawa, Ontario

Each school has its own mission, educational philosophy, identity, history, and culture. Schools want students who will fit in their respective unique environments. The most important aspect is whether a student is admissions-appropriate or admissions-ready. In other words, is the student capable of handling the requirements of the school? Can the student manage the academic, athletic, and extracurricular programs that the school provides? Does the student demonstrate the appropriate level of maturity? These are the main factors that go into determining whether a child is suitable for admission. The purpose is not to pass judgment on a student’s overall aptitude, but rather to determine that the school is the right fit for the family and the child. The right fit includes whether or not the student actually wants to attend the school, or if there are other motivations, such as cultural or familial pressures.

Every school has a slightly different application process. From entrance exams to academic assessments to interviews, parents must note and adhere to the key dates and requirements of each school they’re applying to. Entrance standards vary significantly from those schools that accept all (or nearly all) applicants, to those like Upper Canada College, where in Grade 9 (the last major entry year for the school) as few as one in five are admitted. All of the information you need to begin and complete the application process successfully can be found at OurKids.net. To help you get started, we asked some of Canada’s top schools and education experts to weigh in on the key steps in the evaluation and application process.

Admission practices vary, so it’s important to contact the admissions office for application requirements and deadlines. The admission process typically includes:

a written application detailing your child's personality, academic history, and financial plan;
a visit to the school;
an in-person interview with an admissions team;
completion of an entrance exam.

Application timeline

May	Assemble a list of schools that meet your criteria
June	Request catalogues and videos from selected schools
July	Schedule interviews
August	Make travel arrangements
September	Register for SSAT, or other testing (if applicable) Schedule interviews at the schools of your choice Review admissions forms
October	Attend interviews Check admissions requirements Verify admissions deadlines
November	Complete interviews Determine financial requirements
December	Take SSAT/ISEE tests (if applicable) Complete applications Submit application
January	Submit applications
February	Relax and wait
March	Keep an eye on the mail for the acceptance letter
April	Let schools know your decision

Application deadlines

Fixed date
Many boarding schools have fixed application deadlines, meaning that dates are set for application and admission. Often application deadlines are in late January for the following academic year, though application deadlines vary between schools.

Rolling
Many schools have rolling deadlines, which means they will accept applications up until their enrolment numbers are fulfilled. If you are interested in a few different schools, it’s a good idea to contact the school directly about their admission guidelines and deadlines, as these will vary depending on the school. Rolling deadlines allow you to apply at any time during the year, before or after any initial application deadlines have passed. Schools with rolling admissions may also allow students to enter in the middle of the school year, which can be an advantage for students transferring between schools.

Applying for financial aid
Typically, deadlines to apply for financial aid are fixed even at schools that have rolling application deadlines. This is because aid packages are finite, and otherwise follow the school’s fiscal schedule.

The admission interview

The goal of the interview is to determine whether the student is going to be happy and successful within the school’s academic and social environment. “I always look for a confident student, who can share their interests and their experiences,” says Kimberly Carter, director of enrolment management at Branksome Hall. “But I find even the shyest applicants can come out of their shell if you start with what they know.”

Interviews include a conversation with the family together, as well as a conversation with the student on her own. "It’s very much a dialogue," says Chantal Kenny, executive director of admissions at Upper Canada College. "It's a very open conversation. There are no set questions that really have a yes and no answer. It's about us digging deeper, and probing, and allowing the students to feel comfortable in the interview process so we can get to know them better."

It’s natural for parents to want to prepare their children, but admissions officers agree that the best interviews happen when the student fully takes part, asks questions, and speaks openly and comfortably about who they are and what they want from the school.

“The word ‘interview’ can be overplayed, as this process is typically more like a friendly chat. That being said, good manners are still extremely important. You can prepare by thinking about what the student is interested in both outside and inside the school, and how the parents see themselves and their involvement within the school community.”
–Elaine Danson, Educational Consultant

Entrance tests

Many schools will rely on past report cards but depending on the school and student's age, independent schools will use in-house or standardized testing to determine where your child stands academically compared to other students of his or her age. How much weight each school puts on the test's final outcome varies across the board, but it's only one factor in the overall assessment of a student. "We're looking at the whole student," says Kenny. "We weigh all of the criteria equally." While tutoring isn’t recommended—it often just creates anxiety—it is important to familiarizing the child with the format of the exam they'll be taking.

“The interview allows the admissions committee to add a personal dimension to the application. We typically look for the ‘Five A’s’ in our questioning: Academics, Arts, Athletics, Active Citizenship and Adventure. Other questions we might ask applicants include what types of books do they like to read, who are the people they most admire, etc. A successful interview is one where the student demonstrates—by answering questions about their interest and experience in the ‘Five A’s’—that they are well rounded, confident and would be committed to our school.”
—Kevin White, Director of Student Recruitment, Glenlyon Norfolk School, Victoria, British Columbia

The SSAT

Many boarding schools across Canada require prospective students to complete the Secondary School Admission Test (SSAT) as part of their admissions package. It is used internationally and is administered by the Secondary School Admission Test Board (SSATB). The test is designed to measure verbal, quantitative skill, reading comprehension, and verbal skills. It does not include questions intended to measure achievement or general knowledge.

When taking the SSAT students are asked to complete a writing sample and four sections of multiple choice questions:

two 30-minute math sections with 25 questions in each section
a 40-minute section with 40 questions based on a series of reading passages, including both fiction and non-fiction writing styles
two 30-minute sections with 30 questions in each section

Test scores are based only on the multiple choice questions; the writing sample is unscored. Middle level students (grades 5-7 applying to enter grades 6-8) will receive their result in the form of a scaled score between 440 and 710. Upper level students (grades 8-11 applying to enter grades 9-12) will receive their result in the form of a scaled score between 500 and 800. All students will also receive their result expressed as a percentile (1 to 99) which is calculated through a comparison of the results of all students who have taken the SSAT in the US and Canada within the previous three years. Scores are released two weeks after the test was taken, and there is no indication within the score report of how often a student has taken the SSAT or previous scores earned.

The SSAT is administered at test centres around the world on eight Saturdays each year. Registration is completed online through the SSATB, though schools may offer some assistance in finding appropriate dates and locations. Testing typically begins at 9am, though start times can vary between locations. Students taking the test are required to arrive and check in at least 30 minutes before the start of the test. Results are sent to students, not schools, who are then free to submit them to as many schools as they wish.

Learn more about the SSAT:
Find SSAT Schools
Prepare for the SSAT

The acceptance letter

Schools may have more than just a “yes” or “no” decision. If your child meets the school's requirements but no space is currently available, he or she may be put on a waiting list. If there is insufficient information to make a decision, your application may be deferred and you may be asked to submit additional documentation.

If your child is denied acceptance, it may be because the school does not feel it is the best fit. It’s recommended you consult the admissions office to understand the decision and the reasons behind it.

Financial aid

Deryn Lavell, Head of School at Bishop Strachan, says “it’s very important to us that girls have access to education irrespective of their financial background, or their parents financial background … we’re very interested in getting the greatest girls that we can.”

Tuition can be expensive, to be sure, and more within the reach of families with a broader set of resources at hand. That said, educators are explicitly aware that the best educational setting is one in which access isn’t a function of wealth. Financial programs are based in the understanding that education is devalued if a student’s admissibility is based on financial ability rather than character, leadership potential, values, and an ability to contribute to campus life and the academic culture of the school. Bursaries and scholarships aren’t charity. They are the means by which schools are able to craft their student body in order to create the best educational setting possible, namely one that is reflective of the diversity of perspectives present in the world at large.

“During my six years as head of school at Queen Margaret’s School,” says Pat Rowntree, “we looked at ways to increase participation by families that reflected the population of the surrounding community. In Duncan, situated in the Cowichan Valley, the Cowichan First Nation people have a high profile in both the economic and social life of our community.” The school enacted a system of financial aid to act in concert with the financial programs available within the province and the First Nations communities. Further, they enacted policy changes to support band-sponsored day students and comprehensive scholarships for girls of ability in the secondary school program. “The presence of First Nation students in our school meant that First Nation cultures and histories were more likely to be part of curricular topics and activities at the school, [and] built on the real-life experiences of our students.”

Truly, everyone benefits. Says Kathy LaBranch of Trinity College School, “The person who has a broad exposure to different backgrounds, cultures and experiences is able to be more successful in today’s working world. By ensuring that students are educated in a classroom with students from different countries, cultures, religions, and socio-economic profiles, [we are] modeling the real-world requirements once the student moves on into the working world. In a classroom with true diversity, the debates, conversations and points of view are broader and richer.”

“Our responsibility,” says Kelly Koepp of Shawnigan Lake School, “is to expose our students to a heterogeneous educational environment so that they can nurture an open-minded approach to the world, a willingness to accept different ways of thinking and an ability to navigate a diverse environment.” More than 25 per cent of the students at Shawnigan Lake School receive some sort of financial aid, a figure that is common across private and independent schools.

Susan R. Groesbeck of Havergal College notes that “Raising money to support endowed bursaries is a strategic priority for our school. We make sure that sufficient bursary funds are available to ensure that any mission- appropriate student may attend our school. We adhere to a ‘needs-blind’ admission process; in other words, a student is admitted based solely on her merit and not on her family’s ability to pay.”

All you need to know about boarding school financial aid:
Financial aid and scholarships for boarding schools
How to pay for private school
Complete guide to private school tuition

Travel requirements for international students

NOTE: This is not a legal document, and is intended only to provide a very general overview of the process required of international students when applying to study in Canada. For up-to-date legal information, please refer to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act or the Citizenship Act, as applicable.

All international students who wish to study in Canada for more than six consecutive months must obtain a study permit. To apply, students must first be accepted and have a letter of acceptance in hand.

Citizens of some countries also require a temporary resident visa or an Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) in order to travel to Canada. For more information on travel documentation requirements, and to find out if you need either a visa or an eTA in order to travel to Canada visit the Government of Canada, office of immigration and citizenship website.

Citizenship and Immigration: Applying for a Study Permit prior to arriving in Canada

Student permit
Once a student permit request has been approved you will receive a letter from the office of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The letter must be presented at customs when you enter the county. On entry, the customs officer will exchange the letter for a study permit which will then be stapled inside your passport. For high school students, the study permit is normally valid for the length of the entire school career in Canada plus 90 days.

Custodianship
Children 17 years of age or younger and not arriving with a parent or legal guardian are required to be in the care of a responsible adult while they are in Canada. This person is known as a custodian. The custodian must be designated prior to your arrival in Canada through the completion of a notarized Custodianship Declaration (IMM 5646). The custodian must live in Canada and be older than 19 years of age. Often the custodian is connected to the family as a family friend or relative. Otherwise, the admissions officer of the school that you plan to attend can help if you need to find someone eligible to act as a custodian.

Health and medical insurance
International students need to arrange for their own health and dental coverage while in Canada. Students who hold official landed immigrant status or permanent residency status should apply for provincial health coverage from the province where they will be studying. Students who are not eligible for provincial health insurance must provide documentation to the school showing that they have medical coverage through their parents or otherwise have purchased an international student medical plan. The admissions officer at the school can provide guidance and advice on obtaining a medical plan.

Dos and Don'ts

Submit applications early. Check deadlines and apply well before them.

Be open to options. Don’t pin all your or your child’s hopes on one particular school. Instead, work to find the school that is the best fit for your family.

Let the child guide the process. Don’t push them into a school where they will feel overwhelmed.

Be honest and upfront. Don’t withhold pertinent information about your child. The goal is to ensure that his or her needs can be met at the school.

Be clear about what you want. The best school is one that reflects the values that you’d like your child to adopt.

Prepare. There’s a saying in the admissions world – the difference between a successful application and unsuccessful application is preparation. The best preparation usually involves allowing your child to discover his or her passions and to develop his or her strengths.

Do your homework. Research each school to understand their mission statements, educational philosophies, and programs. It is crucial to know the facts, figures, and history of each school to which you are applying.

Create a compelling case. The most important part of the application is making the compelling case as to why your family is a good fit for the school. Each school will have its own admission criteria so your job is to figure out how you meet most of, if not all, those criteria. Then think about how best you can articulate your message.

Be wise when choosing an admissions consultant. A growing number of families are turning to admissions consultants to help them with their applications. Certainly, some consultants are valuable resources guiding families through the often-confusing and complex world of private school admissions. If you decide to go with a consultant, make sure that he or she takes a student-centered, right-fit approach. The consultant should advise you on schools that are the right fit for your child. Also, make sure your consultant has genuine knowledge of the admissions world gained from actually having worked in private school admissions.

Don’t focus solely on name brand. Focus on finding the right-fit school where your child will flourish and enjoy learning. Of course, the “name brand” private schools have built reputations of excellence, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the right schools for your child. Your child’s happiness factor at school outweighs the prestige of a specific institution.

6. Graduation requirements

Across Canada, high school graduation requirements are set by the provincial boards, not the federal government. Therefore, graduation requirements vary between provinces based on provincial criteria and curricula. Provinces also define the elements of those criteria, including what a “credit” represents, which can make a direct comparison of degree requirements difficult. For example, in BC a credit represents 30 hours of in-class instruction; in Ontario a credit represents the completion of an entire course, not a portion of it. Therefore, in order to graduate, students in Ontario are required to complete 30 credits in grades 9 through 12. In British Columbia 80 credits are required in grades 10 through 12.

Despite whatever the numbers might seem to suggest, the reality is that graduation requirements vary only superficially between the provinces. All require that students study English/French, mathematics, science, Canadian history, geography, and health. In addition to those core subjects, all provinces offer optional courses for credit, and students are free to choose among them. These include courses in technology and computer studies, graphic and performing arts, world studies, international languages, social studies, and cooperative education.

Private schools are required to meet provincial requirements in order to issue provincial graduation diplomas, though many private and independent schools choose to exceed them. For example, Columbia International College requires 36 credits for graduation, though the provincial requirement is just 30. Boarding schools are also able to offer a greater range of courses for credit, including debating, psychology, and business.

In addition to classwork, students must demonstrate an involvement in community service beyond the campus, though many boarding schools choose to exceed provincial guidelines there as well. Students enrolled at at school which offers the International Baccalaureate program, for example, are required to complete 50 hours of volunteer service in order to graduate, exceeding the baseline in all provinces.

Many boarding schools formally require participation in athletics, courses on international languages, or participation in extracurricular programs, such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. Often, these too are included as requirements in order to graduate. All diploma requirements imposed in addition to provincial requirements are at the discretion of the individual schools and do not affect the receipt of the provincial diploma. Any additional requirements made by private institutions are imposed to reflect the core values of the school as they pertain to diversity, service, leadership, and academics.

Degrees offered by international schools

A majority of boarding schools in Canada offer provincial degrees, that is, students graduate with a high school diploma offered by the province in which the school is located. In some cases, schools offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma.

Graduation requirements, as well as the degrees offered by international schools, vary based on focus, curriculum, and affiliation. For example, students attending Neuchâtel Junior College earn credits toward completion of the Ontario Secondary School Diploma. Other schools—including Carlsbad International School, the International School of Asia, Karuizawa (ISAK), and THINK Global School in New York—offer the IB diploma.

The International Baccalaureate Diploma Program

The International Baccalaureate is a two-year advanced secondary school curriculum that was founded in 1968 and is now taught in schools in more than 140 countries, including many alternative institutions in Canada.

The IB curriculum was created for students aged 16 to 19. It is intended to provide a well-rounded, high quality, advanced course of study that delivers the basics of high school education while challenging students to apply their knowledge and skills through collaboration, discussion, and communication.

In order to earn an IB diploma students complete a course of study in six core subject areas (language and literature, language acquisition, individuals and societies, sciences, mathematics, and the arts) an essay of up to 4000 words, and sit standard, externally assessed exams. In addition to course work, students are also required to complete two formal projects and a minimum of 50 hours of community service.

University recognition of the IBDP

Each of Canada's universities is free to sets its own admissions standards and to assess each candidate based on their own internal criteria. There is no national university entrance exam or governing body overseeing university admissions. As a result, admission criteria can vary widely, even between universities within Canada. Students are required to contact colleges or universities directly to find a list of admission requirements and deadlines, and to submit transcripts in support of their application.

While the specific details of recognition can vary between universities—or, in some cases, even between faculty within a university—the IB diploma is widely accepted as an admission credential if the scores earned meet certain targets. In some instances, IB courses and exams are recognized for transfer credit within an institution, used in fulfillment of university degree requirements and/or fulfilling course prerequisite requirements.

Elementary schools are grades 1 to 6.
Secondary schools are grades 7 to 12 in most provinces, with the exception of Quebec where secondary school runs from grades 7 to 11.
The school year runs from September to June.
Canadian high school diplomas are recognized by colleges and universities worldwide.

7. The alumni experience

“The bonds of friendship that you form at this school will, throughout your life, be of priceless value to you. Treasure them.”
–Cornelius Burke, Shawnigan Lake School, ’34

On January 20, 2014, the Peterborough Examiner ran a story of the swearing in of a new king of Spain, Felipe VI. Sarah McMahon, the head of Lakefield College School, was quoted saying that she was “delighted and proud to hear His Majesty King Felipe VI was proclaimed the new King of Spain this morning in Madrid.”

While the ceremony happened an ocean and a world away, for Peterborough the story was also a local one; for McMahon, it was a personal one. Felipe attended Lakefield College School as a student and retains ties to the school, its faculty, and former students even today, including a visit in 2010 to attend his graduating class’s reunion.

Felipe arrived at Lakefield in 1984 as a shy 16-year-old despite being heir to the Spanish throne. “It was in Canada that I fought my first battle,” he told Spain’s El Mundo in 1998. “I had to face the distance from my family, from Spain, and from my friends. I had to deal with a different language, climate and customs I did not know … It was a challenge I needed to overcome. I think it was worth it.”

While at Lakefield he received letters from his father, King Juan Carlos, that, in addition to the usual father/son banter, included some notes on what it means to be a sovereign. Published in a 2008 book, Juan Carlos wrote in those letters of the need to be a “kind, attentive, and helpful” king. “You need to appear natural, but not vulgar; cultivated and aware of problems, but not pedantic or conceited.” Juan Carlos wrote that the royals needed to “earn their throne every day.” He wasn’t the first royal to study at Lakefield. Prince Andrew, Duke of York, attended in 1977 through an exchange program with Gordonstoun, the boarding school he attended in Scotland.

While not every school has such high-flying alumni, all are conscious of the lives that their students go on to, and they retain ties with them after they’ve gone. To those on the outside looking in, a list of prominent alumni can appear to be little more than a form of name dropping. Yet, for the faculty and students, awareness of notable graduates can be meaningful in ways that, often, are difficult to describe.

Even from a distance, students are inspired by the people who once sat where they do now, though often there isn’t much distance at all. There is a strong “pay it back” mindset among boarding school alumni, one that provides an important aspect of boarding school culture and the life of a school. The desire to help one's fellow alumni runs deep, and the networks at many Canadian private schools are notoriously tight. Alumni often return to visit with faculty and students, offering insight about their time at the school, the strength of their education, as well as the challenges and the successes they faced after they left.

Alumni—both individually and as a group—reflect the values and the strengths of an institution. TFS alumni, for example, include a remarkable number of leaders within health and human rights: Samantha Nutt, founder of War Child Canada; Karandeep Sonu Gaind, psychiatrist and passionate advocate for improvements in care for the mentally ill; Carole Piovesan, a lawyer and advocate for international human rights. Alumni of St. Clements include historian Margaret MacMillan, administrator Julia Foster, journalist Adrienne Arsenault, and writer Claudia Dey. Havergal alumni include engineer Marcia Lamont Scott, jazz vocalist Carol Welsman, journalist and senator Linda Frum, and Paula Cox, who went on to serve as the premier of Bermuda.

All provide hints of the strengths of various schools. For students within them, they can grant a sense of possibility, inspiration and an expanded self-concept. The “if she can do it, why can’t I” attitude is a powerful motivator. There is a knowledge that a range of possibilities might be closer than, at times, they may appear.

When alumni visit and speak to students, that sense of possibility can take on more concrete forms of mentorship and support between the student and the school community. Having a chance to question someone who may literally have sat in the same seat, in the same classroom, can be an inspiring or even profound experience. It’s also a demonstration that the culture of the school continues, and that time spent there is often the beginning of a life-long relationship.

“When you leave, you alter the school forever, just as you altered it when you arrived. It is this concert of voices that will stand as our shared moment in history.”
–Jay Connolly, Shawnigan Lake School, '80

Havergal College Alum, Carol Welsman. Five-time Juno Award nominee, and producer and songwriter for such artists as Celine Dion, Ray Charles and Pavarotti.
Read Boarding school: a continuing tradition.

8. Compare boarding schools

Academics

	Primary curriculum	Secondary curriculum	Curriculum pace	Academic culture	Average class size	Special needs support	Tech integration
Upper Canada College Toronto, Ontario SK to 12 (Boys) Boarding school (80 students) Day school (1120 students) $36,750 to $71,875	Liberal Arts	International Baccalaureate	Accelerated	Rigorous	20 to 25	No support	Heavy integration
Trinity College School Port Hope, Ontario 5 to 12 (Coed) Day school (290 students) Boarding school (280 students) $25,750 to $68,500	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	12 to 16	No support	Medium integration
St. John's-Kilmarnock School Waterloo Region (Breslau), Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (420 students) Boarding school (50 students) $17,415 to $64,750	Progressive	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	10 to 17	No support	Medium integration
Havergal College Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Girls) Day school (950 students) Boarding school (50 students) $36,950 to $68,540	Liberal Arts		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	18 to 22	No support	Medium integration
Académie Ste-Cécile International School Windsor, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (200 students) Boarding school (50 students) $10,950 to $50,000	Traditional	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	10 to 16	Indirect Support	Medium integration
Branksome Hall Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Girls) Day school (910 students) Boarding school (50 students) $33,630 to $66,805	Liberal Arts	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	16 to 22	No support	Heavy integration
Albert College Belleville, Ontario Preschool to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (99 students) Day school (204 students) $18,700 to $75,400	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	15	Indirect Support	Medium integration
The Bishop Strachan School Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Girls) Day school (930 students) Boarding school (70 students) $35,800 to $69,145	Progressive	Reggio Emilia	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	18 to 20	No support	Heavy integration
Royal Crown School Scarborough, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school (160 students) Boarding school (140 students) $22,800 to $22,800	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	10 to 15	No support	Medium integration
Appleby College Oakville, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school (513 students) Boarding school (272 students) $40,020 to $79,870	Liberal Arts		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	12 to 16	No support	Heavy integration
Rosseau Lake College Rosseau, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (81 students) Day school (39 students) $22,700 to $66,300	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Supportive	15 to 18	No support	Medium integration
Lakefield College School Lakefield, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (285 students) Day school (140 students) $38,600 to $79,200	Liberal Arts		Standard-enriched	Supportive	15	No support	Medium integration
Rothesay Netherwood School Rothesay, New Brunswick 6 to 12 (Coed) Day school (160 students) Boarding school (150 students) $25,130 to $70,830	Liberal Arts	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Supportive	14 to 16	No support	Heavy integration
Glenlyon Norfolk School Victoria, British Columbia JK to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (24 students) Day school (746 students) Homestay school (30 students) $20,840 to $73,145	Progressive	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	16 to 18	No support	Medium integration
McDonald International Academy Toronto, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (30 students) Day school (200 students) $20,800 to $20,800	Traditional		Accelerated	Supportive	10 to 20	No support	Medium integration
Laureate College Burlington, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (20 students) eSchool school (60 students) Boarding school (12 students) $9,600 to $44,800	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Supportive	6 to 12	No support	Heavy integration
The Hill Academy Caledon, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (25 students) Day school (15 students) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (125 students)	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	6 to 18	No support
St. Margaret's School Victoria, British Columbia JK to 12 (Girls) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (225 students) $17,200 to $69,100	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	8 to 20	No support	Medium integration
Applewood Academy for Progressive Learning Belleville, Ontario 1 to 12 (Coed) Day school (5 students) Boarding school (30 students) $27,500 to $79,750	Progressive		Student-paced	Supportive	4 to 6	Special needs school	Medium integration
North Star Academy Laval, Quebec 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school Day school $12,400 to $31,500	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Supportive	10 to 18	Indirect Support	Medium integration
Robert Land Academy Wellandport, Ontario 5 to 12 (Boys) Boarding school (100 students) $61,200 to $65,200	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	10 to 16	Special needs school	Light integration
SPIRE Academy Geneva, Ohio(USA) 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (90 students) $42,900 to $59,900	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Supportive	12 to 17	Indirect Support	Medium integration
Nancy Campbell Academy Stratford, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school Boarding school $15,750 to $37,275	Liberal Arts		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	5 to 18	Withdrawal Assistance	Heavy integration
St. Michaels University School Victoria, British Columbia K to 12 (Coed) Day school (745 students) Boarding school (258 students) $21,095 to $75,360	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Rigorous		No support	Medium integration
Stanstead College Stanstead, Quebec 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (195 students) Day school (65 students) $25,455 to $79,770	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	11 to 15	No support	Medium integration
Niagara Christian Collegiate Fort Erie, Ontario 6 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school Day school Homestay school $11,205 to $49,675	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	15 to 20	Resource Assistance	Heavy integration
Brookes Westshore Victoria, British Columbia 4 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (150 students) Day school (150 students) $9,500 to $52,550	Progressive	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	12 to 18	No support	Light integration
Canadian College Italy Lanciano, 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (80 students) $24,500 to $42,900	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	10 to 12	No support	Medium integration
St. Stephen's School, Rome Rome, --------------- 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (250 students) Boarding school (50 students) $25,650 to $39,600	Liberal Arts	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	10 to 15	Indirect Support	Medium integration
Holy Family Achievement School of Académie Ste-Cécile Windsor, Ontario 5 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (15 students) Day school (2 students) $20,000 to $65,000	Liberal Arts				1 to 5	Special needs school
Maple Leaf World Schools - Canada Richmond, British Columbia 10 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (35 students) Day school (35 students) Day school (35 students) $22,850 to $37,950	Traditional	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Supportive	10 to 20	Indirect Support	Heavy integration
Houghton Academy Houghton, New York(USA) 6 to 12 (Coed) eSchool school (75 students) Boarding school (75 students) Day school (75 students) Homestay school (25 students) $7,499 to $43,000	Traditional		Standard-enriched		17	No support
St. John's-Ravenscourt School Winnipeg, Manitoba K to 12 (Coed) Day school (870 students) Boarding school (20 students) $23,100 to $63,670	Liberal Arts	Reggio Emilia	Accelerated	Rigorous	18 to 24	No support	Heavy integration
Athol Murray College of Notre Dame Wilcox, Saskatchewan 8 to 12 (Coed) Day school (30 students) Boarding school (275 students) $11,000 to $51,000	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	16	Full-time Dedicated Class	Heavy integration
Balmoral Hall School Winnipeg, Manitoba Preschool to 12 (Girls) Day school (470 students) Boarding school (40 students) $15,450 to $49,440	Progressive	International Baccalaureate	Accelerated	Supportive	10 to 20	Resource Assistance	Heavy integration
Trillium School Markham, Ontario Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed) Day school (320 students) Day school (50 students) Boarding school (30 students) $11,500 to $37,500	Traditional	Montessori	Accelerated	Rigorous		No support	Medium integration
Ridley College St. Catharines, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (377 students) Day school (334 students) $25,875 to $82,500	Progressive	International Baccalaureate	Accelerated	Rigorous	17	Withdrawal Assistance	Heavy integration
Merrick Preparatory School Merrickville, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (60 students) eSchool school (30 students) Day school (20 students) $16,450 to $58,200	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	8 to 12	No support	Medium integration
Great Lakes Christian High School Beamsville, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (60 students) Day school (50 students) $8,400 to $45,000	Liberal Arts		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	5 to 28	Indirect Support	Heavy integration
Agate Private School St Catharines, Ontario Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed/Girls) Day school (100 students) eSchool school (100 students) Boarding school (1 students) Homestay school (60 students) $350 to $9,158	Progressive		Student-paced	Supportive		Resource Assistance	Medium integration
NOIC Academy Markham, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (268 students) Day school (21 students) $999 to $18,000	Traditional	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	6 to 15	No support	Medium integration
Queen Margaret's School Duncan, British Columbia Preschool to 12 (Coed) Day school (410 students) Boarding school (95 students) $14,413 to $69,313	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	16 to 22	No support	Medium integration
College Bourget Rigaud, Quebec Preschool to 12 (Coed) Day school (1604 students) Boarding school (100 students)	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Supportive		Special needs school
Bodwell High School North Vancouver, British Columbia 8 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (480 students) Day school (40 students) Homestay school (40 students) $24,500 to $47,575	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	18 to 24	No support	Medium integration
Unisus School Summerland, British Columbia JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (100 students) Boarding school (60 students) $14,800 to $59,480	Progressive	International Baccalaureate	Student-paced	Supportive		No support	Heavy integration
Nile Academy Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (15 students) Day school (220 students) $8,400 to $30,000	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	12 to 16	Indirect Support	Medium integration
J. Addison School Markham, Ontario Preschool to 12 (Coed) Day school (200 students) Boarding school (100 students) $16,500 to $40,800	Reggio Emilia		Standard-enriched	Supportive	8 to 15	No support	Light integration
Columbia International College Hamilton, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school Day school Boarding school $3,000 to $3,000	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	12 to 22	No support	Medium integration
Luther College High School Regina, Saskatchewan 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (100 students) Day school (330 students) $9,530 to $45,180	Liberal Arts	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	23	No support	Light integration
Pickering College Newmarket, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (375 students) Boarding school (110 students) $26,520 to $67,075	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	18 to 20	No support	Heavy integration
Rosthern Junior College High School Rosthern, Saskatchewan 10 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (40 students) Homestay school (Varies) $4,500 to $32,750	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Supportive	15 to 20	Indirect Support	Medium integration
The Gow School South Wales, New York(USA) 6 to 12 (Coed) Day school (15 students) Boarding school (135 students) $58,750 to $80,000	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Supportive	4 to 5	Special needs school	Heavy integration
Haven International School Brantford, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (50 students) eSchool school (40 students) Day school (10 students) $8,500 to $26,500	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Supportive		Indirect Support	Medium integration
Queen Ethelburga's Collegiate York, - Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed) Day school (322 students) Boarding school (870 students) $74,000 to $88,000	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	16 to 20	Indirect Support	Medium integration
St. Andrew's College Aurora, Ontario 5 to 12 (Boys) Boarding school (254 students) Day school (394 students) $37,655 to $70,095	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	17	No support	Heavy integration
Fulford Academy Brockville, Ontario 6 to 12 (Coed) Day school (25 students) Boarding school (50 students) eSchool school (50 students) $2,000 to $57,885	Progressive		Standard-enriched	Supportive	6 to 12	Withdrawal Assistance	Heavy integration
Bishop's College School Sherbrooke, Quebec 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school (50 students) Boarding school (220 students) $30,000 to $75,710	Traditional	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	12 to 15	Withdrawal Assistance	Heavy integration
Ashbury College Ottawa, Ontario 4 to 12 (Coed) Day school (635 students) Boarding school (112 students) Homestay school (Varies) $26,300 to $64,700	Traditional	International Baccalaureate	Accelerated	Rigorous	17	No support	Medium integration
Mennonite Collegiate Institute Gretna, Manitoba 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (45 students) Day school (45 students) $6,285 to $26,435	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Supportive	15 to 20	Resource Assistance	Heavy integration
Shawnigan Lake School Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia 8 to 12 (Coed) Day school (100 students) Boarding school (440 students) $28,500 to $71,300	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	17	Withdrawal Assistance	Heavy integration
London International Academy London, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed/Girls) Boarding school (200 students) Boarding school (145 students) $28,000 to $28,000	Traditional	International Baccalaureate	Standard-enriched	Rigorous	5 to 15	No support	Medium integration
King's-Edgehill School Windsor, Nova Scotia 6 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (205 students) Day school (190 students) $18,800 to $58,800	Traditional	International Baccalaureate	Accelerated	Rigorous	15	Withdrawal Assistance	Medium integration
Brentwood College School Mill Bay, British Columbia 8 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (421 students) Day school (105 students) $25,700 to $66,000	Liberal Arts		Standard-enriched	Supportive	16	No support	Heavy integration
Trafalgar Castle School Whitby, Ontario 4 to 12 (Girls) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (190 students) $26,125 to $70,625	Liberal Arts		Standard-enriched	Rigorous	16	Withdrawal Assistance	Heavy integration
Dewey Institute Bracebridge, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) eSchool school (580 students) Day school (60 students) Boarding school (150 students) $18,000 to $36,950	Traditional		Standard-enriched	Supportive		Full-time Dedicated Class	Medium integration
Kells Academy Montreal, Quebec K to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (30 students) Day school (300 students) Boarding school (40 students) $17,300 to $35,800	Traditional		Student-paced	Supportive		No support	Heavy integration
The Sacred Heart School of Montreal Montreal, Quebec 7 to 12 (Girls) Day school (10 students) Day school (210 students) Boarding school (10 students) $17,875 to $61,190	Traditional		Accelerated	Rigorous	14 to 18	Resource Assistance	Medium integration

Special needs support

Legend:

ADHD

Learning disorders:
Dyslexia
Auditory processing disorder
Dyscalculia
Dysgraphia
Language processing disorder
Non-verbal learning disorders
Visual motor deficit

Development disorders:
Autism
Asperger's

Behavioural and emotional:
Troubled teens
Depression
Suicidal
Substance abuse
Oppositional defiant disorder

Physical:
Dyspraxia
Blindness
Deafness
Cystic fibrosis
Multiple physical


Upper Canada College Toronto, Ontario SK to 12 (Boys) Boarding school (80 students) Day school (1120 students) $36,750 to $71,875
Trinity College School Port Hope, Ontario 5 to 12 (Coed) Day school (290 students) Boarding school (280 students) $25,750 to $68,500
St. John's-Kilmarnock School Waterloo Region (Breslau), Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (420 students) Boarding school (50 students) $17,415 to $64,750
Havergal College Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Girls) Day school (950 students) Boarding school (50 students) $36,950 to $68,540
Académie Ste-Cécile International School Windsor, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (200 students) Boarding school (50 students) $10,950 to $50,000
Branksome Hall Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Girls) Day school (910 students) Boarding school (50 students) $33,630 to $66,805
Albert College Belleville, Ontario Preschool to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (99 students) Day school (204 students) $18,700 to $75,400
The Bishop Strachan School Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Girls) Day school (930 students) Boarding school (70 students) $35,800 to $69,145
Royal Crown School Scarborough, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school (160 students) Boarding school (140 students) $22,800 to $22,800
Appleby College Oakville, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school (513 students) Boarding school (272 students) $40,020 to $79,870
Rosseau Lake College Rosseau, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (81 students) Day school (39 students) $22,700 to $66,300
Lakefield College School Lakefield, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (285 students) Day school (140 students) $38,600 to $79,200
Rothesay Netherwood School Rothesay, New Brunswick 6 to 12 (Coed) Day school (160 students) Boarding school (150 students) $25,130 to $70,830
Glenlyon Norfolk School Victoria, British Columbia JK to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (24 students) Day school (746 students) Homestay school (30 students) $20,840 to $73,145
McDonald International Academy Toronto, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (30 students) Day school (200 students) $20,800 to $20,800
Laureate College Burlington, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (20 students) eSchool school (60 students) Boarding school (12 students) $9,600 to $44,800
The Hill Academy Caledon, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (25 students) Day school (15 students) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (125 students)
St. Margaret's School Victoria, British Columbia JK to 12 (Girls) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (225 students) $17,200 to $69,100
Applewood Academy for Progressive Learning Belleville, Ontario 1 to 12 (Coed) Day school (5 students) Boarding school (30 students) $27,500 to $79,750
North Star Academy Laval, Quebec 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school Day school $12,400 to $31,500
Robert Land Academy Wellandport, Ontario 5 to 12 (Boys) Boarding school (100 students) $61,200 to $65,200
SPIRE Academy Geneva, Ohio(USA) 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (90 students) $42,900 to $59,900
Nancy Campbell Academy Stratford, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school Boarding school $15,750 to $37,275
St. Michaels University School Victoria, British Columbia K to 12 (Coed) Day school (745 students) Boarding school (258 students) $21,095 to $75,360
Stanstead College Stanstead, Quebec 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (195 students) Day school (65 students) $25,455 to $79,770
Niagara Christian Collegiate Fort Erie, Ontario 6 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school Day school Homestay school $11,205 to $49,675
Brookes Westshore Victoria, British Columbia 4 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (150 students) Day school (150 students) $9,500 to $52,550
Canadian College Italy Lanciano, 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (80 students) $24,500 to $42,900
St. Stephen's School, Rome Rome, --------------- 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (250 students) Boarding school (50 students) $25,650 to $39,600
Holy Family Achievement School of Académie Ste-Cécile Windsor, Ontario 5 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (15 students) Day school (2 students) $20,000 to $65,000
Maple Leaf World Schools - Canada Richmond, British Columbia 10 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (35 students) Day school (35 students) Day school (35 students) $22,850 to $37,950
Houghton Academy Houghton, New York(USA) 6 to 12 (Coed) eSchool school (75 students) Boarding school (75 students) Day school (75 students) Homestay school (25 students) $7,499 to $43,000
St. John's-Ravenscourt School Winnipeg, Manitoba K to 12 (Coed) Day school (870 students) Boarding school (20 students) $23,100 to $63,670
Athol Murray College of Notre Dame Wilcox, Saskatchewan 8 to 12 (Coed) Day school (30 students) Boarding school (275 students) $11,000 to $51,000
Balmoral Hall School Winnipeg, Manitoba Preschool to 12 (Girls) Day school (470 students) Boarding school (40 students) $15,450 to $49,440
Trillium School Markham, Ontario Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed) Day school (320 students) Day school (50 students) Boarding school (30 students) $11,500 to $37,500
Ridley College St. Catharines, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (377 students) Day school (334 students) $25,875 to $82,500
Merrick Preparatory School Merrickville, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (60 students) eSchool school (30 students) Day school (20 students) $16,450 to $58,200
Great Lakes Christian High School Beamsville, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (60 students) Day school (50 students) $8,400 to $45,000
Agate Private School St Catharines, Ontario Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed/Girls) Day school (100 students) eSchool school (100 students) Boarding school (1 students) Homestay school (60 students) $350 to $9,158
NOIC Academy Markham, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (268 students) Day school (21 students) $999 to $18,000
Queen Margaret's School Duncan, British Columbia Preschool to 12 (Coed) Day school (410 students) Boarding school (95 students) $14,413 to $69,313
College Bourget Rigaud, Quebec Preschool to 12 (Coed) Day school (1604 students) Boarding school (100 students)
Bodwell High School North Vancouver, British Columbia 8 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (480 students) Day school (40 students) Homestay school (40 students) $24,500 to $47,575
Unisus School Summerland, British Columbia JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (100 students) Boarding school (60 students) $14,800 to $59,480
Nile Academy Toronto, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (15 students) Day school (220 students) $8,400 to $30,000
J. Addison School Markham, Ontario Preschool to 12 (Coed) Day school (200 students) Boarding school (100 students) $16,500 to $40,800
Columbia International College Hamilton, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school Day school Boarding school $3,000 to $3,000
Luther College High School Regina, Saskatchewan 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (100 students) Day school (330 students) $9,530 to $45,180
Pickering College Newmarket, Ontario JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (375 students) Boarding school (110 students) $26,520 to $67,075
Rosthern Junior College High School Rosthern, Saskatchewan 10 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (40 students) Homestay school (Varies) $4,500 to $32,750
The Gow School South Wales, New York(USA) 6 to 12 (Coed) Day school (15 students) Boarding school (135 students) $58,750 to $80,000
Haven International School Brantford, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (50 students) eSchool school (40 students) Day school (10 students) $8,500 to $26,500
Queen Ethelburga's Collegiate York, - Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed) Day school (322 students) Boarding school (870 students) $74,000 to $88,000
St. Andrew's College Aurora, Ontario 5 to 12 (Boys) Boarding school (254 students) Day school (394 students) $37,655 to $70,095
Fulford Academy Brockville, Ontario 6 to 12 (Coed) Day school (25 students) Boarding school (50 students) eSchool school (50 students) $2,000 to $57,885
Bishop's College School Sherbrooke, Quebec 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school (50 students) Boarding school (220 students) $30,000 to $75,710
Ashbury College Ottawa, Ontario 4 to 12 (Coed) Day school (635 students) Boarding school (112 students) Homestay school (Varies) $26,300 to $64,700
Mennonite Collegiate Institute Gretna, Manitoba 9 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (45 students) Day school (45 students) $6,285 to $26,435
Shawnigan Lake School Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia 8 to 12 (Coed) Day school (100 students) Boarding school (440 students) $28,500 to $71,300
London International Academy London, Ontario 9 to 12 (Coed/Girls) Boarding school (200 students) Boarding school (145 students) $28,000 to $28,000
King's-Edgehill School Windsor, Nova Scotia 6 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (205 students) Day school (190 students) $18,800 to $58,800
Brentwood College School Mill Bay, British Columbia 8 to 12 (Coed) Boarding school (421 students) Day school (105 students) $25,700 to $66,000
Trafalgar Castle School Whitby, Ontario 4 to 12 (Girls) Boarding school (50 students) Day school (190 students) $26,125 to $70,625
Dewey Institute Bracebridge, Ontario 7 to 12 (Coed) eSchool school (580 students) Day school (60 students) Boarding school (150 students) $18,000 to $36,950
Kells Academy Montreal, Quebec K to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (30 students) Day school (300 students) Boarding school (40 students) $17,300 to $35,800
The Sacred Heart School of Montreal Montreal, Quebec 7 to 12 (Girls) Day school (10 students) Day school (210 students) Boarding school (10 students) $17,875 to $61,190

9. Glossary

The AP program allows high school students to take university courses for an extra challenge and to give them a head start in their post-secondary education. There are now over 30 rigorous AP courses and exams spanning many subjects available to high school students in Canada.

CAIS

The Canadian Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) was established in 1981 as a national network for member schools supporting collaborative initiatives in leadership, education, management and governance. Its key activities included organizing, coordinating, and facilitating conferences, benchmarking, senior management compensation surveys, and advocacy. CAIS includes over 90 schools in Canada, Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, and Switzerland. All CAIS schools commit to undergoing a reflective and collaborative school improvement process, meet National Standards, and participate in research and professional development.

Chapel

Many schools have a weekly or daily chapel, a term that doesn’t necessarily mean what it suggests. Services can range from very religious to something more akin to a school-wide assembly. In all cases, school-wide meetings are important to student life, promoting a sense of community and reaffirming the goals and values of the institution.

Crew/rowing

The sport of rowing has long been associated with private school and university, and is a tradition that remains today. Rowing is offered in the fall and spring. Schools participate in regional and international competitions called regattas, such as the Royal Henley Regatta, which has been held in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, annually for more than 130 years. Rowing is unique in the world of sports in that it offers an engagement in competition as well as a very time-honored tradition.

Duke of Edinburgh

The Duke of Edinburgh program is for students aged 14-24 and encourages personal growth through life experience. Students choose either a Bronze, Silver or Gold level of program, and complete a personal activity in various sections: volunteering, physical, skills, expedition and residential. Completion of each award takes a minimum of six months. The program was founded in England in 1956

Dorm master

A dorm master is a teacher who supervises a residential house of boarding school students.

Fieldhouse

A fieldhouse is an indoor sports arena. The fieldhouses and athletic facilities at many boarding schools often rival those found colleges and universities, and are often paid for through legacy gifts. Boarding schools take sports very seriously, with Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays often set aside for sports and physical recreation.

Five-day boarding

Students spend the week on campus, living in a dormitory, and the weekends at home with family.

Form

Form is another word for grade. It derives from the British 'public' or private secondary schools. Form I is seventh grade, form II eighth grade, and so on.

Harkness method

Teaching done around an oval table in order to encourage discussion and collaboration. The method was devised in contrast to passive learning styles, such as classroom lectures.

Headmaster

Headmaster or head teacher are terms for principal or chief administrator. More traditional schools typically use headmaster, but not always.

House

A House is a physical grouping of students in a residential or boarding facility. Within boarding schools, houses provide the structure and social framework within which students interact, compete and socialize. Much like cabin groups at summer camp, houses also often provide a valuable sense of kinship, shared experience, and belonging.

The IB organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to create academic programs to challenge students while promoting intercultural respect and understanding. These programs feature subjects like math, science, physical education and the arts, but also personal and social skills, humanities and technology. Students must also study a second language and complete a personal project.

Independent schools

Independent schools are, most typically, not-for-profit institutions accountable to a board of trustees, which operate at arm’s length from the administration. They are distinguished from private schools which are most typically for-profit organizations established and controlled by one or more persons.

ISEE

ISEE or Independent Schools Entrance Examination is a standardized admissions test used by many boarding schools.

Master

The word takes its roots from the Latin magister which means teacher, which is what it means when used in the context of boarding school.

Middle school

Grades 7 and 8, though in some cases can refer to lower grades as well, such as grades 5–8.

Prep

Short for “preparatory” and referring to schools formed with the intention of preparing students for university.

Private schools

Private schools are generally understood to be for-profit organizations established and controlled by one or more persons. They are distinguished from independent schools, which are not-for-profit schools and accountable to a board of trustees which operates at arm’s length from the administration.

Round Square

With exchanges available in schools worldwide, students are able to travel between cultures, participate in community service and simply experience a variety of learning environments to develop the Round Square IDEALS of Internationalism, Democracy, Environment, Adventure, Leadership and Service.

Senior school

Grades 11 and 12

Specialty

Specialty schools have a specific focus, such as arts, athletics, science, technology and the environment. Specialty schools allow families to find a program that will help their child fulfill their potential in a specific area.

SSAT

The SSAT or Secondary Schools Admissions Test is the most widely used standardized admissions test.

TOEFL

TOEFL or Test of English as a Foreign Language is a test of English language proficiency administered by the Educational Testing Service.

Upper school

Grades 9 and 10

10. Further resources

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School Name		Cost
Whytecliff Agile Learning Centres (est. 1993) 8 to 12 (Coed) Day school (46 students) Homestay school (1 students) Progressive Langley, British Columbia Whytecliff is a safe, empathetic & supportive place for teens with a diverse range of learning needs / personal challenges. Our positive community & high-growth environment pulls each child up to be their very best! View profile Safe, empathetic, supportive community for students with a diverse range of learning needs Low student-to-educator ratio of less than 5:1 lets us really get to know you Each child gets a personalized program tailored to their unique gifts, strengths, and talents Dual-accredited as both an independent school and a Positive Youth Development program Kids love it here! On average, student attendance doubles (vs. previous learning environment) $8,900 to $19,500 Our Kids Review View profile	Not specified	$8,900 to $19,500 Our Kids Review View profile
Hawthorn School (est. 1989) Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Girls/Coed) Homestay school Day school Day school Liberal Arts Toronto, Ontario Hawthorn School is located in Toronto. We offer a co-ed toddler-SK program and an all girls program for grade 1- grade 12. Our unique mentoring program is tailored to help students reach their full potential. View profile $15,000 to $40,000 User reviews (3) View profile	Not specified	$15,000 to $40,000 User reviews (3) View profile
Hillfield Strathallan College (est. 1901) Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed) Day school (1275 students) Homestay school (30 students) Traditional, Montessori Hamilton, Ontario Established in 1901, Hillfield Strathallan College is one of Canada’s leading co-educational independent schools, offering academic programs from Montessori Toddler and Pre-K to Grade 12, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. View profile $19,349 to $32,052 User reviews (1) View profile	Not specified	$19,349 to $32,052 User reviews (1) View profile
Woodland Christian High School (est. 1976) 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (325 students) Homestay school (30 students) Liberal Arts Breslau, Ontario Students receive an excellent education which prepares them well for university, college and a wide variety of workplaces. View profile $10,760 to $27,680 Our Kids Review User reviews (3) View profile	Not specified	$10,760 to $27,680 Our Kids Review User reviews (3) View profile
Toronto STEM School (est. 2013) 9 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (15 students) Day school (30 students) Progressive Toronto, Ontario We go beyond curriculum expectations to provide opportunities for students to earn admission into their choice of university using our AP accreditation, staff expertise and individual goal setting in small classes. View profile $14,500 to $17,500 User reviews (5) View profile	Not specified	$14,500 to $17,500 User reviews (5) View profile
London Christian High (est. 1965) 9 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (3 students) Day school (218 students) Progressive London, Ontario LCH is the only full-service independent high school in London. Through a Christian worldview, we offer the OSSD, OFSAA sports, extracurriculars, travel opportunities, and authentic learning experiences. View profile $9,000 to $16,449 User reviews (1) View profile	Not specified	$9,000 to $16,449 User reviews (1) View profile
Alexander Academy (est. 2013) 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (150 students) Homestay school (150 students) Progressive Vancouver, British Columbia Alexander Academy is a private high school offering the BC Dogwood High School Diploma and a unique University Transfer Program in a culturally rich and academically challenging environment. View profile $16,500 to $22,800 User reviews (1) View profile	Not specified	$16,500 to $22,800 User reviews (1) View profile
Rockway Mennonite Collegiate (est. 1945) 7 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (25 students) Day school (260 students) Traditional Kitchener, Ontario Incorporating academic excellence, service and peace-making, Rockway is a diverse learning community of students in Grades 7 to 12 including a dynamic international student exchange program. View profile $18,400 to $39,500 View profile	Not specified	$18,400 to $39,500 View profile
Venture Academy Troubled Teens Program (ON) 7 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (1 students) Traditional Barrie Area, Ontario Venture Academy is a therapeutic treatment and education program for students who may be struggling with ADHD, learning challenges, underachieving, behavioural issues, and a variety of clinical diagnoses. View profile Varies View profile	Not specified	Varies View profile
Lycée international de Calgary (est. 1966) Preschool to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (10 students) Day school (430 students) Traditional Calgary, Alberta Lycée international de Calgary is the only school in Calgary to teach the French Ministry of Education and Alberta Education curricula. 3-years-old to Grade 12. All linguistic backgrounds are welcome. Small class sizes. View profile $15,390 to $20,000 User reviews (2) View profile	Not specified	$15,390 to $20,000 User reviews (2) View profile
Hamilton District Christian High (est. 1956) 9 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (10 students) Day school (500 students) Progressive Ancaster, Ontario HDCH, founded in 1956, is imaginative, innovative & interwoven with our essential Biblical identity. Our programs are designed to challenge a wide range of learners. We welcome local and international students! View profile $18,125 User reviews (4) View profile	Not specified	$18,125 User reviews (4) View profile
Country Garden Montessori Academy (est. 1995) JK to 12 (Coed) Day school (100 students) Homestay school (5 students) Montessori Newmarket, Ontario Situated on seven acres of rolling parkland and gardens, Country Garden Montessori Academy in Newmarket is a co-ed private day school for students in grades PS-12. The school provides a family atmosphere and is committed the intellectual growth and emotional well-being of students. View profile $8,100 to $25,900 View profile	Not specified	$8,100 to $25,900 View profile
St. George's School of Montreal (est. 1930) K to 11 (Coed) Day school (460 students) Homestay school (15 students) Progressive Montreal, Quebec In our progressive educational environment, students acquire a life-long love of learning as we challenge each student to academically excel and become confident, innovative problem-solvers, and engaged, active citizens. View profile $20,081 to $24,754 View profile	Not specified	$20,081 to $24,754 View profile
Venture Academy Troubled Teens Program (AB) (est. 2000) 7 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (1 students) Traditional Red Deer Area, Alberta Venture Academy is a therapeutic treatment and education program for students who may be struggling with mood disorders & anxiety disorders, behavioural challenges, substance misuses, ADHD, ADD and ODD View profile Varies View profile	Not specified	Varies View profile
Vaughan College Private School (est. 2009) 9 to 12 (Coed) eSchool school (250 students) Day school (70 students) Homestay school (20 students) Liberal Arts Vaughan, Ontario At Vaughan College instructions are embedded with strategies appropriate to the students' unique needs. We develop students' confidence and their urge to do better, which results in a high university acceptance rate. View profile $570 to $32,000 View profile	Not specified	$570 to $32,000 View profile
Community Life Christian School Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed) Day school (70 students) Homestay school (7 students) Traditional Toronto, Ontario We welcome children from all families, Christians, or non-Christians. We tailor make k-12 curriculum to fit each kid’s unique characteristics. our teachers are professional with truthful love & highly responsible. View profile $2,000 to $34,700 View profile	Not specified	$2,000 to $34,700 View profile
Durham Elementary, Durham Academy and G.B.M.S. (est. 1984) Nursery/Toddler to 12 (Coed) Day school (140 students) Homestay school (0 students) Day school (7 students) Progressive, Montessori Oshawa, Ontario At G.B.MS, D.E.P.S and Durham Academy Secondary school focus is on each individual student and helping them meet their unique potential and goals. We believe in excellent customer service and families have a voice. Throughout the year we enhance our programs through program enhancement and enrichment. View profile $1,000 to $11,500 View profile	Not specified	$1,000 to $11,500 View profile
Thetford Academy (est. 1819) 7 to 12 (Coed) Day school (298 students) Homestay school (2 students) Progressive Thetford, Vermont(USA) TA’s award-winning faculty are recognized for their innovative teaching practices, learners are engaged, and diversity is celebrated. TA students work collaboratively and independently to reach their full potential. View profile US $20,963 to US $49,545 View profile	Not specified	US $20,963 to US $49,545 View profile
Don Valley Academy (est. 2002) 9 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (20 students) Day school (60 students) Traditional Toronto, Ontario Don Valley Academy is a private high school whose primary aim is to prepare our students for post-secondary studies. We are dedicated to providing educational programs that meet the individual needs of each student. View profile $9,900 to $13,200 View profile	Not specified	$9,900 to $13,200 View profile
Webtree Academy (est. 2016) 9 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (50 students) Day school (50 students) Traditional North York, Ontario Webtree offers individualized education programs which fully support a student’s academic needs, and helps them achieve educational and personal goals. Small class sizes are designed to inspire and engage students. View profile $14,000 to $35,000 User reviews (1) View profile	Not specified	$14,000 to $35,000 User reviews (1) View profile
Keystone School (est. 2011) 7 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (30 students) Day school (100 students) eSchool school (120 students) Progressive Toronto, Ontario Keystone students become internationally-minded inquirers, who ask questions and seek their own answers from both local and global perspectives. By nurturing students’ natural curiosity, we foster a love for learning. View profile $18,700 User reviews (5) View profile	Not specified	$18,700 User reviews (5) View profile
Braemar College (est. 1995) 9 to 12 (Coed) Homestay school (450 students) Day school (450 students) eSchool school (200 students) Progressive Toronto, Ontario Braemar College offers a warm environment in downtown Toronto for students with high academic ambitions. Flexible terms allow students to join anytime, providing fast and focused pathways into Canada’s top universities. View profile $13,800 to $30,000 User reviews (3) View profile	Not specified	$13,800 to $30,000 User reviews (3) View profile
Toronto District Christian High School (est. 1963) 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (395 students) Homestay school (30 students) Liberal Arts Woodbridge, Ontario Each student is unique. Why be just a number when you can be valued for who you are? We enfold, engage and empower every student in a safe, friendly, and supportive learning community. It's where you belong! View profile $18,600 to $24,000 User reviews (8) View profile	Not specified	$18,600 to $24,000 User reviews (8) View profile
King's Christian Collegiate (est. 2001) 9 to 12 (Coed) Day school (670 students) Homestay school (40 students) Traditional Oakville, Ontario King’s Christian Collegiate is an independent Christian high school providing superb instruction in a safe, stimulating academic environment. Caring staff set the tone for a positive, up-beat culture. View profile $17,600 View profile	Not specified	$17,600 View profile

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